AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 & 5750: DirectX 11 for the Mainstream Crowd
by Ryan Smith on October 13, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Crysis: Warhead
Kicking things off, we’ll start with Crysis: Warhead. Warhead is still the single most demanding game in our arsenal, with cards continuing to struggle to put out a playable frame rate with everything turned up.
Update: As a few of you pointed out, there was something a bit off with our Crysis results; we had a Radeon 4850 beating the 5770. As it turns out we wrote down the maximum framerate for the 4850 instead of the average framerate. None of the other results were affected, and this has been corrected. Sorry, folks.
There are a few different situations we’re going to be interested in. The first is the matchup between the 5770, the 4870, and the GTX 260. The second is the matchup between the 5750, the 4850, and the GTS 250. The third is the 5770 as compared to the 5800 series, in order to see what another $100 or $200 is buying you in the Evergreen family.
Unfortunate for the 5770, this is not a game that treats it well. In spite of the clock speed advantage over the 4870, and the architectural advantages (extra caches and what-not), it underperforms the 4870 by about 15% here. AMD had once told us that they believed that they weren’t memory bandwidth constrained on the 4870/4890, but when that’s the only significant difference between the 5770 and the 4870 that would explain the performance difference (certainly Juniper wouldn’t be slower than RV770), we are beginning to doubt that. Meanwhile the GTX 260 outscores the 5770 here too.
Looking at the 5770 compared to the 5850, $100 buys you roughly 50% more performance.
The 5750 fares much better here. It beats the 4850 by 10%-20%, and beats the GTS 250 by a similar margin.
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Mint - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
The 4870 will only drop in price to clear inventory, because it's not worth it to produce them with the intent of selling them at $120 or less. I expect them to sell out before the price drops much further.Don't fret, though. The 5770 has a 128-bit bus and a fairly small die. It will drop in price soon enough, unless NVidia decides to stop bleeding $$ on its huge GT200 chips on $150 cards and Fermi-based mainstream cards can't get down in price.
samspqr - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
well, my favorite retailer (alternate.de) already has the 5750 and 5770 in stock, at 130eur and 160eur respectivelythey also have the 4870-1GB at 115eur, which is MUCH cheaper
in any case, right now, with my usage pattern (24/7 on, but mostly GPU-idle, maybe just one hour a day of GPU stress), the difference in power consumption between the 4870 and the 5770 is at least 50w, which means ((50*24*365)/1000)*0.15eur/KWh = 65.7eur/year
so it pays for the difference in just over 6 months, at the expense of slightly lower performance, with the advantage of less noise
speaking of which, I like my GPUs silent, passive if possible, thankyouverymuch, so I'll wait for vendor-specific designs or after-market coolers; by the time these are out, maybe the 4870 will not eve be available anymore
samspqr - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
(sorry, that was 8 months, don't know how I got that 6 the first time)7Enigma - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Search for and download GPUTool. It's still in beta and has some quirks but for massive idle power drop it cannot be beat (at least for my system, 4870). I simply lowered the 2D core/memory clocks (they have a low/medium/high setting, and ALL need to be the same setting or you get flickering), down to around 250MHz, and this dropped idle power consumption by a crazy amount (40-80w, can't remember exactly). Once the creator of the program releases a newer version I'm hoping some of the fan speed and voltage mod bugs get worked out. Even so, the 2 second click to lower idle speeds is incredibly handy.HTH
chrnochime - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I don't know if you've tried using ATI tray tool already, but after scourging around the web trying to figure out way to keep my XFX 4870 1GB from drawing more power than needed(e.g. when just surfing/playing video), I was able to drop the GPU clock to 400 MHz, and memory to 225 MHz. The memory draws much more power than does the GPU, so leaving GPU at 400 doesn't really make that much of a difference, compared to 250.Keep in mind that running said program in Vista is somewhat of a headache, since the driver is not signed by MS, so you need to do the work-around to get it running as startup program so the clocks drop can be initiated by the program.
makechen - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
48566565rdh - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
A year later, the 5770 is *cheaper* than the 4850/4870. I just purchased one for $99 from the egg. It consumes 30% less power at idle and at load than the 48xx cards.I suppose at the $160 price point, it was fine to slam this card. At the current price point, though, it is the BEST price-for-performance and performance-per-watt card out there.